PART IV

THE JOURNEY

THE FORSAKING

SEE, your companions have gone; Will you not too make a start? If you desire to take wing as a bird, Then leave to the vultures this carrion world.

Forsake your relations, For your real Friend must be sought. He who is drowning in the sea of Not-being Must cast aside all relationships. What are father and mother, Sister and brother? Your very son may be your enemy, Yet may a stranger be your kinsman; Even your fellow-travellers on the mystic path Must be renounced.

All relations are a bond, a spell, A fairy dream, An absolute illusion.

Omit not the duties Of the law to them, But have regard to yourself. . . . Abandon gold and women, For they are a source of anxiety.

THE TRAVELLER

THE traveller on the path, ’Tis he who knows from whence he cometh; Then doth he journey hastily, Becoming as pure from self as fire from smoke. Unfolded to him are a series of revelations From the beginning. Till he is led away From darkness and sin. He now retraces stage by stage his steps Till he reaches his goal the Perfect. Thus is the perfect man evolved From the time he first exists As inorganic matter,

Next a breath of spirit, and he is living And from God draws his motive powers. Next the Truth makes him lord of his will, As in childhood his discernment of the world unfolds. And now the world's temptations assail him.

. . . Anger appears and desires of the flesh, And then avarice, pride, and gluttony; His nature becomes evil, Worse than an animal or demon; Now is he at the lowest point of all, The point opposite to Unity.

. . . Should he remain fettered in this snare, He goes further astray than the beasts; But if there shines a light from the spirit world, Divinely attractive, Or if he can find a reflection of proof, Then will his heart respond in a feeling of kinship To this Light of the Truth, And he will turn back and retrace his steps From whence he came. To faith assured he has found his way Through certain proof, or the wonder And attraction of the Divine,

THE INFANT AND THE YOUTH

So you remain with your mother, The fleshly elements, Until you join your Father up on high.

THE ALMOND-TREE

As the kernel of an almond is spoilt utterly If it is plucked from its husk while unripe, So error in the path of the pilgrim Spoils the kernel of his soul. When the knower is divinely illumined, The kernel ripens, bursts the husk, And departs, returning no more. But another retains the husk, Though shining as a. bright sun, And makes another circuit. From water and earth springs up into a tree, Whose high branches are lifted up to heaven; Then from the seed of this tree A hundredfold are brought forth. Like the growth of a seed into the line of a tree, From point comes a line, then a circle; When the circuit of this circle is complete, Then the last is joined to the first.